The Daily Bray 8/15/2025

Old School Campaign Manual Part I

Archive 2/2012

Section 1

The Beginning

This entire program initially began with the 912 Project by convincing enough of us to take the next step to become involved with the Republican Party. They had people sign up as PCP’s (Precinct Committee Person) and we did in order to have influence and bring a more Conservative view to the moderation we have been frustrated with. When I went to the PCP meeting put on by Ivonne Pflaum, I met a couple of like-minded people who had no idea what they were doing either. They told us to organize our precincts and we looked at each other and said, “What’s a precinct?”

Roger Law, Jim McConnell and I got together after the meeting for an hour and decided how we would organize. Roger found a list of everybody in our three precincts that had all sorts of information on them as to their Party, age and how many times they voted in the past 7 elections. This is where our 3 biggest ideas came from.

The first was that we would pray before we knocked on doors. The second was that we would knock every door in Tualatin on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6-8 PM every week until the election. The last and most important, was we would join in groups of three to make our group as strong as possible which is when we became The Three Amigos or, Biblically three stranded cord, which is not easily broken.

The group of three is not only Biblical but it maximizes your talents and flexibility. You can not only have full and complete brainstorming sessions together but you each bring unique strengths and weaknesses, making you stronger as a team. One person’s weakness may be another one’s strength to make the trio extremely powerful. As you go through the battles of the campaign season you grow closer as you know you have your partners watching your back. This allows you to be bolder as your combined strengths give you the ability to become stronger and more creative. The power of three is a wise strategy in every situation, especially in something as personal as politics. We recommend you form these groups of three throughout your area to interconnect into a web.

The next idea we came up with was the sorting lists to identify the Republicans we thought may want to help us with our campaign. Roger was our spreadsheet expert and when we noticed the lists we had included not only the Party membership but the number of times they voted in the previous elections we wondered if we could sort them into strength of political intensity.

If we could find the most intense neighbors, we thought we could talk to them about taking the next step and becoming involved in the campaign. Republicans are not normally involved in such uncomfortable things as going door to door to talk about their politics but we needed volunteers if we were going to knock the entire town. That is when we decided we needed 100 volunteers to accomplish our goal, and the lists would be the way we would find help.

We now needed a way to tie the campaign together and keep everybody enthused with something as mundane and unappealing as knocking doors. This was my talent which was writing little Taking Back Tualatin blast emails of encouragement while we worked our way through the town.

After each night of knocking on door knocking, I would tell how many doors and write a couple paragraphs telling a little story or insight we would have while we were canvassing. It might be a funny thing that happened or something important on someone’s doorstep or whatever seemed interesting so the volunteers and candidates could follow along with our journey.

The important part of these blast emails was to tell everybody what street corner we were starting on but the added value was to keep everybody encouraged or at least be a part of the adventure as we worked our way across the town.

These little snippets held our program together as they were blast emailed to the volunteers as well as the candidates to help energize the troops. The Tualatin Patriots became a very well-known group in Washington County as the people read our stories and walked along with our journey and virtually joined our adventure.